Carter Gibson
Carter joined the DC office as a Campaign Management Intern in summer 2011. Though back in school for his senior year pursuing a dual degree in Marketing and Film/Media Arts at American University, he’s stayed on to blog! An avid and passionate social media user, Carter is also a regular contributor at PlusHeadlines.com providing editorials and news about Google+. Nerdy fun fact? Carter can look at a roller coaster and tell you who built it.
Posts by Carter
Same Message, Different Ways of Spreading it
I don’t know about you, but I have an online presence everywhere – Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Pandora, Blogs, Spotify, a Myspace I can’t delete, and more. Corporations and non-profits like the Ad Council aren’t so different. With all these different ways to use the Internet and, more importantly, represent yourself, it’s becoming harder to maintain a consistent brand image. But with this increased difficulty in keeping a brand’s message consistent across multiple, varied platforms comes the potential to exploit the opportunity for a much stronger brand.
Some brands think that they should use every social platform the same way. If a Facebook post says, “Product X launches today!” so will their tweet and Google+ post (once G+ allows brands that is). This isn’t the kind of brand consistency I’m talking about. That’s just lazy. Do you want to have a lazy brand? Didn’t think so. Rather, brands need to have innovative ways exploit the very best of each platform. If they all did the same thing there wouldn’t be a need to have more than one. Despite their similarities, social platforms have definitive strengths and weaknesses.
Facebook, for instance, is amazing with contests thanks to their support of widgets. Twitter, on the other hand, may be a much better place for engaging people or addressing concerns. When Google+ allows corporate pages, Hangouts (video conferences between up to 10 people) will challenges brands to engage their customers face-to-face – a first for social media. Capitalizing on these innate advantages will only help to round out a brand, not fragment it. For instance, a consumer who doesn’t like the way Facebook works isn’t going to follow that brand on twitter if they treat it like Facebook. But they will follow it if it uses Twitter “the right way.”
Filed under: Social Media
Tags: Social Media
What You See is What You Get with Vizualize.me’s Resume Service
I’m an early adopter of just about anything I can get my hands on – Android tablets, 4G phones, Spotify, Google+, OSX Lion – and most recently I’ve been granted early beta access to two very cool websites. They are VoyURL and Vizualize.me. I’ll elaborate on VoyURL another day. For this post I want to focus on Vizualize.me. The site provides a very simple, very powerful service – Vizualize your resume in one click. Pulling from your Linkedin profile, an elegant, focused, and uncluttered resume is generated in infographic form. I clearly couldn’t resist trying it out.
In a job market that only seems to be getting more competitive, differentiation is practically a must. “In the age of data overload, the text resume is slowly becoming a living anachronism,” reads Vizualize.me’s press release. I personally couldn’t agree more and have always thought that resumes can blend together and have a tendency to show very little about who you are as a person. Not being very traditional myself, I decided that my resume needed a Photoshop makeover. This was my finished product:
Filed under: Just for Fun
Tags: online resumes, Vizualize.me
Social Media Background Checks – Would you pass?
The next time you apply for a job your ‘could-be employer’ may require a social media background check. That’s right. Employers looking at candidates’ presence online is an actual “thing” now. If you’re waiting for a, “It’s like a criminal background check but not,” line…well. Keep waiting because it’s exactly like a criminal background check. A company called Social Intelligence actually specializing in professional eligibility research recently made its service available to businesses everywhere.
Here’s how it works: Company A wants to hire Candidate B but also want to make sure he/she won’t cause the company any trouble down the road. Company A hires Social Intelligence to stalk Candidate B from information obtained from his/her resume (name, email, school, hometown, etc). They look up Candidate B’s activity on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, MySpace, dating sites, forums, blog sites, Wikipedia (Get the point?) over the last seven years and compile a document that then tells Company A that Candidate B has or has not engaged in illegal, racist, mean, or sexually explicit behaviors…publicly at least. Candidate B either passes or fails. It’s like Googling someone, but excessively more effective.
While I certainly have some concerns about the subjectivity of what’s “too inappropriate” (all checks are done by humans by the way, not computers), I think we all knew this day was coming. ‘Social Media Background Checks’ are the new ‘Character References’ and, as a person who desperately wants to know if he would pass or fail his own official background check, I understand how much insight this service could offer an employer.
Filed under: Social Media
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